We describe an efficient method for the recovery of homonuclear dipole–dipole interactions in magic-angle spinning NMR. Double-quantum homonuclear rotary resonance (2Q-HORROR) is established by fulfilling the condition ωr=2ω1, where ωr is the sample rotation frequency and ω1 is the nutation frequency around an applied resonant radio frequency (rf) field. This resonance can be used for double-quantum filtering and measurement of homonuclear dipolar interactions in the presence of magic-angle spinning. The spin dynamics depend only weakly on crystallite orientation allowing good performance for powder samples. Chemical shift effects are suppressed to zeroth order. The method is demonstrated for singly and doubly 13C labeled L-alanine.

A new goniometer for single-crystal nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has been constructed and built into a multinuclear X–1H double-tuned probe for cross-polarization and/or 1H decoupling. Improvements in the ease of mounting/remounting the crystal on the three rotational axes and in the accuracy of the stepwise rotation about these axes have been achieved compared to the usual cube goniometer. A similar improvement is achieved for the determination of the orientation of the crystal relative to the goniometer frame. The NMR goniometer has three dovetail mortises that enable rotation of the crystal about three orthogonal axes, all perpendicular to the magnetic field. The crystal is glued onto a tenon that fits precisely into the dovetails of the NMR goniometer and also into a slightly modified x-ray diffraction goniometer, thereby allowing a high-accuracy determination of the orientation for the tensorial NMR interactions with respect to the crystal frame. The performance of the goniometer is illustrated by single-crystal 23Na NMR spectra of NaNO3.